Depression and mental disorders can be prevented and treated with simple healing foods
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A new study published in the February 15, 2005 issue of Biological Psychiatry shows that certain foods are better at treating depression than antidepressant drugs. The study found that omega-3 fatty acids and foods high in a compound called uridine were able to reduce the symptoms of depression as well as or better than three different antidepressant drugs that were tested. This research was conducted at the McLean Hospital, which is affiliated with Harvard. It’s very exciting to see this kind of study, because it shows yet more scientific evidence for the healing effects of food as well as the relative uselessness of prescription drugs.
Based on the results of this study, it seems silly that anyone would continue to use antidepressant drugs to try to treat depression when there are simple healing foods available that do a better job. This is especially true when considering the potentially dangerous side effects of antidepressant drugs that are now coming to light, including increased risk of suicides, violent behavior, and other similar acts of aggression. But what healing foods in particular are we talking about in this study? In addition to the omega-3 fatty acids, these health enhancing substances are found in walnuts, molasses, and fish, according to researchers. They’re also found in many other foods.
It’s especially interesting to note that molasses is included in this list, because molasses is produced as a waste product from the sugar refining industry. When you refine sugar beets or whole grains in order to make refined white sugar or white flour, you remove as much as 98% of the nutrition from those natural foods, leaving only a white, super sweet, highly concentrated refined sugar, and that’s what ultimately gets fed to human beings. The waste product from this is a thick, brown, syrupy liquid—that’s molasses. Molasses contains most of the nutrition of the original food, including the vitamins, minerals, and various compounds such as uridine. It is this molasses that’s normally sent off to be used in livestock feed, and yet what we’re finding here with this research is that this molasses can help prevent depression. Eating molasses is part of a food strategy that’s just as good as antidepressant drugs.
All of this also goes to show why people who pursue healthy diets tend to have such a positive outlook and outstanding mental health—it’s the foods, stupid, because the food greatly affects your mental state, and if you eat healing foods, and foods rich in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients, then you’re going to have healthy mental function and will probably never experience depression, especially if you combine these foods with natural sunlight. But if you eat processed foods and manufactured foods, as are generally consumed by most Americans, then of course you’re going to be depressed, because you’re not giving your brain the nutrients it needs to achieve a healthy mental state.
So it is in fact the food supply that is causing depression in this country. It’s all the refined ingredients that have their nutrition stripped away. That’s what’s causing depression, but what do we do in this country to treat depression? We come up with new drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, and we give those to people and charge them sometimes thousands of dollars a year to stay on these drugs. They don’t need these drugs—what they really need are just healing foods. They need to go to the grocery store, shop for some healthy foods like wheat germ, molasses, avocados, and so on, and eat those foods in order to have healthy brain balance and avoid depression. It’s really not that difficult.
What else is exciting here is that we’re seeing yet more benefits of omega-3 fatty acids. These omega-3 oils are almost miracle-class healing nutrients. They enhance heart health, they reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, they boost brain function and nerve system function, and now we’re seeing they even function as effective antidepressants. Clearly, omega-3 fatty acids are one of the most exciting nutrients in foods that are available to American consumers, and you can get these in everyday foods, or as nutritional supplements in things like salmon oil or flax seed oil. You can also eat chia seeds if you’d like to get some good, healthy omega-3’s.
By the way, the news of the healing potential of these foods and the fact that these foods can treat depression better than antidepressant drugs may be new to the general public and conventional medical doctors, but it’s old news to those in the fields of holistic nutrition and natural health. This has been known for a very long time. We know that eating nuts and molasses and getting good nutrition greatly affects mental health. And we know that most of those who are depressed in this country are only depressed because of a lack of nutrition, whether it’s through a lack of nutritionally balanced food, or a lack of what I call vibrational nutrition, which is natural sunlight. In fact, virtually every common disease today can be treated if not entirely prevented through foods and lifestyle changes. Even those diseases that sound mysterious and seem to have some weird genetic origin, such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, are really just names placed on patterns of symptoms that are more often than not caused by nutritional deficiencies in the first place.
But what’s really amazing is that this is the first time we’ve seen studies really exploring the degree of the healing impact of these particular foods. Why is it that we live in a nation with health care priorities that cause us to spend billions of dollars testing antidepressant drugs and synthetic chemicals, but yet we will spend very little money on testing the healing qualities of natural foods and nutritional supplements? Clearly we have our priorities backwards, because it turns out that the answer to depression is readily available to every American consumer, right in their grocery store, right now. You can literally walk into your grocery store and find cures for depression, cures for early stage cancer, cures for diabetes, and cures for heart disease. There are cures right there in every grocery store, available right now.
In fact, I’m going to be working on a book called Grocery Healing that takes you through a grocery store shopping experience and shows you how to buy foods and products that can prevent or even reverse any of the modern common diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and so on. And of course I’ll include depression in that book, and I’ll be talking about molasses, nuts, fish oils, and wheat germ. So the answers for these diseases are really right in front of us every single day. And if you’re willing to take one step further and actually visit a health food store or a natural grocery store, then you can find even more healing foods. You can bring in even better nutrition and more potent phytochemicals for preventing these chronic diseases.
It’s really no big mystery—what we need to do as a nation is simply get back to our healing foods as they come out of the ground, as they are provided by mother nature. We need to recognize the disease-promoting problems with processed and manufactured foods, everything from carbonated soft drinks to packaged instant rice products. And we need to be honest and say, look, these are the foods that are causing disease in this country, and that if we are going to be a disease-free nation, we’ve got to stop trying to find new synthetic chemicals to mask symptoms of disease, and stop poisoning ourselves with the food supply. We’ve got to ban toxic ingredients like hydrogenated oils. They should have no place whatsoever in the food supply. We’ve got to outlaw things like homogenized milk fats, because of the way they promote atherosclerosis and cardiovascular heart disease. We have to eliminate ingredients like sodium nitrite, which causes cancers throughout the body, especially cancers of the digestive tract such as colorectal cancer.
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